Staff updates

ERASMUS links forged with Stockholm University

ELAP are pleased to announce that new links between SOAS and the Department of Linguistics at Stockholm University have been established to allow an exchange for teaching staff between the two universities. The ERASMUS Mobility Agreement, set up by Dr Oliver Bond at SOAS and Dr Ljuba Veselinova at Stockholm University, forges the way for an exchange between members of teaching staff at the two institutions. It is hoped the exchange will broaden the experience of students by allowing academic staff from Stockholm to contribute their expertise to the core curriculum at SOAS. The new links follow on from a successful visit to SOAS by Dr Veselinova during Endangered Languages Week 2008, when she provided an innovative workshop on Geographic Information Systems (GIS).

Feodor Lynen Fellowship awarded to ELAP

The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation has awarded a Feodor Lynen Fellowship to Professor Tania Kuteva of Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf to spend 18 months visiting ELAP. Professor Kuteva will work with Professor Peter K. Austin, a former Humboldt Prize winner, and other staff and students. Professor Kuteva is well known for her research on grammaticalisation and cross-linguistic studies of language change. She has published five books (several of which are standard references for the study of grammaticisation and language change) along with over 35 articles. She will visit SOAS for the period 1st October to 31st March in each of 2009-10, 2020-2011 and 2011-2012. During her visits she will be carrying out research on "The genesis of semantically complex grammatical categories in the evolution of grammar" and will be teaching advanced level courses on grammaticalisation and language change.

ELAP staff win research grants [August 08]

Recently several ELAP staff members have been awarded competitive research grants:

• Oliver Bond received a travel grant of £700 from the British Academy to present a paper on "Confirmative aspect-modality in Eleme" at the World Congress of African Linguistics WOCAL 6, at Universidade de São Paulo in Brazil
• Friederike Lüpke has been awarded £21,600 for a period of research leave funded by the AHRC in order to create a first corpus of the Gunyaamolo variety of the endangered Atlantic language Bainouk of Senegal
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• Irina Nikolaeva (co-applicant, Primary Investigator Larisa Leisio, University of Tampere) has received a grant from the Academy of Finland, for a project to write a comparative grammar of Samoyedic languages. The amount awarded is 542,620 euros
• Julia Sallabank has been awarded a grant of £5,900 by the Nuffield Foundation to carry out an investigation into the role of a Language Support Officer in endangered language revitalisation, comparing language policies and outcomes in Guernsey with Jersey and the Isle of Man

Dr Irina Nikolaeva wins Wings WorldQuest 2008 Women of Discovery Award [April 08]